tgiFHI | Jennifer Flaherty, "'Conditions of the Working Class in Russia’: Towards a Poetics of Praxis"

tgiFHI is a weekly series that gives Duke faculty in the humanities, interpretive social sciences and arts the opportunity to present their current research to their departmental and interdepartmental colleagues, students, and other interlocutors in their fields.

On Friday, October 31, 2025 we will be hosting Jennifer Flaherty, Assistant Prof. of Slavic Studies & Eurasian Studies.

This paper offers a rare literary reading of one of the most important but still understudied works of the democratic populists in Russia, a socialist movement that preceded Russian Marxism in the 1870s. Focusing on the motif of vision as related to the empirical study of poverty, the paper situates Vasily Bervi-Flerovsky's "Conditions of the Working Class in Russia" in a trend of Enlightenment-Sentimentalist poetics that reaches from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. It uses Bervi-Flerovsky's alternations of literary vignettes and sociological data in his 500-page opus, the first of Russian sociology, as a case study in which literature helps embody rather than distract from economic realities.

Jennifer Flaherty is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University. She earned her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley and has held academic appointments at the College of William & Mary, New York University, and the University of Bologna. Her work focuses on the social and economic forms of Russian literature in the nineteenth century, including representations of peasants.

tgiFHI events take place from 9:30-11:00 a.m. on Friday mornings in the Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall (C105, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse) with breakfast at 9 am. RSVP for the date here!